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Book: Bush-Cheney partnership 'misunderstood'

One of the great mysteries of modern politics is the true nature of the relationship between President George W. Bush and his more experience vice president, Dick Cheney -- a veil a new book seeks to pierce.

Book: Bush-Cheney partnership 'misunderstood'

One of the great mysteries of modern politics is the true nature of the relationship between President George W. Bush and his more experienced vice president, Dick Cheney — a veil a new book seeks to pierce.

In Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, author Peter Baker writes that they had the most influential White House collaboration since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

"But if it was a partnership of enduring and controversial consequences, it was also one that was widely misunderstood," Baker writes in an article for The New York Times Magazine to be published Sunday, but online now.

Cheney was powerful — but not as powerful as Bush.

The two did establish a new national security apparatus after 9/11, and directed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Baker writes that their combined influence lives on, in ongoing debates over the terrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the balance between national security and personal privacy when it comes to government surveillance and other law enforcement techniques.

But the Bush-Cheney relationship frayed over the years. In his magazine piece, Baker spotlights one of the last acts of their time together: Bush's refusal to grant a pardon to long-time Cheney aide Scooter Libby, convicted of perjury during the investigation of the outing of a CIA officer.

"That their final hours together would be consumed by a private argument over the pardon of Scooter Libby underscores the distance the two men had traveled.

"Over the course of conducting hundreds of interviews with key players in the Bush White House, including Cheney, and examining thousands of pages of never-released notes, memos and other internal documents, I came to see a relationship that differs substantially from the commonly accepted narrative.

"Even in the early days, when a young, untested president relied on the advice of his seasoned No. 2, Cheney was hardly the puppeteer that critics imagined.

"To the extent that the vice president exerted outsize influence in the first term, he became more marginalized over the course of the second, as Bush sought new paths to right his troubled presidency."